McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan's inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher -- probably the greatest of the 20th century -- the most important aspect of Heidegger's thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather "Dasein," "being-in-the-world") are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

Too Big to Know thus amounts to a fairly straightforward marriage of the Canadian mystic to the gnomic German philosopher. The digitization of 21st-century media, Weinberger argues, leads not to the creation of a "global village" but rather to a new understanding of what knowledge is, to a change in the basic epistemology governing the universe. And this McLuhanesque transformation, in turn, reveals the general truth of the Heideggarian vision. Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free.

The causal force lying behind this massive sea change is, of course, the internet. Google search results -- "9,560,000 results for 'Heidegger' in .71 seconds") -- taunt you with the realization that there are still another 950,000-odd pages of results to get through before you reach the end. The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The "web world" is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks.

¶ 3:13 PM